Skyscape (20 page)

If only he had known this all along. He had done all the right things, following what he interpreted as the correct format throughout his teenage years. He had believed, in those distant days, that the world was a meritocracy, that you achieved success in big things by first mastering the small, the academic, the local. He had gone to school, San Francisco State, earnestly taking classes for a semester or two in art history and watercolor, because he knew that to follow the prescribed procedure was to find success.

And it was success that he wanted, after a youth that was a string of foster homes, homes in Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro. He had heard of artists hindered by uncaring parents, narrow-minded stepfathers, unloving guardians, but most adults in Curtis's life had responded with kindness. One foster father let Curtis have half the space in the garage of the San Leandro tract house, and most adults had encouraged the youth, seeing in him something uncommon.

He had worked hard on his art, drawing, painting, staying up all night, aided occasionally by amphetamines he bought from other students, and by filterless cigarettes he later grew to loathe, but usually kept awake only by his desire to finish one work of art and begin another.

He had talent as a youth, and he stood in line with his registration packet, with his application for the scholarships. His life as a very young man had been a matter of standing in line, knowing how to queue, how to wait one's turn for space in the classroom, room at the gallery, knowing how to show up to the drawing class on time, in a prominent place so the teacher could see the thin, dark-haired student with so much talent.

Until Bruno Kraft had stepped before him at his first opening, one of those white-wine and Doritos affairs. Bruno Kraft was widely published at the time, but still building his reputation. “Stop doing whatever else you're doing,” the critic had said, “and paint.”

The stitch in his side began to hurt badly. He couldn't tell his enemies from his friends—that had always been his problem.

The rush of the freeway traffic was loud, the ceaseless wheels of cars, of trucks, freight and lives sweeping everything to one side or the other on their way toward a thousand destinations.

Curtis stumbled again, and almost fell, but caught himself against a newspaper rack. The stitch in his side had become a steel bite. Jesus—he was tired. Sweat soaked his shirt. But he was there now—the eight lanes of Highway 101.

For a moment he saw what he had always seen in freeways, how much they promise, and how much they deliver. This is the way, the highway says. This is the way home, the way out.

He ran up the on-ramp, his knees wobbly, weak. A driver somewhere leaned on his horn. There was another twisted blare as Doppler effect bent the sound of a car horn.

In an instant he was not tired. Not even a little bit. He could see it in his mind, the painting he would make of this, a brilliant, lifetime-best painting, all light and movement.

The stitch didn't hurt anymore. The car exhaust was sharp in his lungs. He could taste the grit, the road grease, the fumes of brake lining and transmission fluid.

Margaret ran a red light. She didn't even see it, and then, seeing it, she was already across the intersection. She swerved to miss a woman cradling a dog in her arms. A car was double-parked in the lane ahead of her as someone heavyset and slow got out of the passenger's side.

She had always been impatient with people who complained about the traffic in San Francisco, feeling that the problem was not nearly as bad as people contended. She steered around a large, dark car trying to edge into a parking place Margaret could see with the briefest glance was way too small.

“Among the top stories we're following, there has been a shooting at the home of Red Patterson,” a voice on the radio was saying.

A policewoman held out her arms, palms forward in the headlights, pale as the gloves of a mime. Margaret did not stop. The policewoman pounded the hood of the BMW as Margaret finally braked. The woman's face adopted the expressionless mask of authority as she tugged at a flashlight, her book of unwritten tickets, her radio.

Margaret left the car idling, door open in the middle of the street, and ran past the cop. The woman called after Margaret, but Margaret sprinted.

An ambulance made its way through the crowd, then gradually broke free of the knot of people and was free, siren running, lights hammering the dark.

Margaret tried to elbow through the crowd outside the fortress of Red Patterson's home, but there were too many people. Emergency lights flashed. Yet more police cars angled into place in the street. There was chaos, a hubbub of voices, weeping people, shocked, staring, blindly curious.

A path had been cleared when a body was taken out. The path closed in again as people explained to each other what they had seen, what they had heard on the radio, what someone said they saw on the news.

Maybe it was a massacre in there. Hey, it happened all the time. Someone said they had seen Patterson on a stretcher, but somebody else said this wasn't true. The crowd was stupid with excitement and someone else said the only thing that made logical sense:
They haven't brought Red Patterson out yet so he might be dead
.

Margaret climbed forward.
Let me through
.

There were too many guns out in the streets, someone said. The cops couldn't do anything. Cops made it worse. One voice rang out above the others, a man greeting his friends, who were just arriving at a run. “They shot the shit out of him!” cried the voice.

Margaret struggled, working her way toward the yellow ribbon marked
Police line
—
do not cross
. The yellow plastic band was twisted, the imprecation not to cross upside down, backward, all but impossible to read, and yet its message did not have to be read. Its presence bespoke crime, violence, the law hastily at work. Margaret elbowed her way further and called to the woman police officer on duty that she was looking for her husband.

The woman could not hear what Margaret was calling, and did not care to approach, but a plainclothes cop recognized Margaret and pulled up the glossy yellow ribbon for her to pass into the crime scene.

It was a house of dramatic paintings, the thick carpets, slightly damp, the still-moist nap already blotted with footprints. There was the perky fragrance of lemon-scented carpet shampoo. The rooms were quiet, but with the busy murmur of a bank, an insurance company. It did not seem like a crime scene. It seemed like a very busy place where everything had to be done perfectly.

Yes, Curtis had been here just when the shooting took place, said a cop in a blue sports jacket. “I think it was him. There's a checklist of visitors.”

“But Curtis is all right?” she asked.

“I don't know. I don't even know where he is. Look around.”

She looked, and she asked, but knew as she gazed at one person after another, that Curtis had vanished. When the checklist was produced, Curtis was the only name at the top of a clean sheet, although his name was misspelled
Noons
.

The crowd was stirring outside. People gathered in small groups up and down the darkened street of neat lawns and careful hedges.

The policewoman made a gesture of exasperation when she saw Margaret. “This is your car,” said the woman, confirming, not asking.

“I need to find my husband,” said Margaret.

The woman made a gesture, one hand out, someone waving away a very slow fly. “I just called a tow truck.”

He's all right, though. Wherever he is, he had to be all right. He will come back to me, she told herself. Now he doesn't have any choice.

But that wasn't true, she chided herself. In life, as in chess, the trouble is so often that there are too many choices.

She had recorded an interview recently for KQED FM. “Curtis is about to enter a new stage in his career,” Margaret had said. It was painful to remember the self-assurance in her voice.

Brilliant, she thought. Absolutely brilliant.

The policewoman was scribbling a ticket. Margaret put her hand over the hurrying pen. The woman looked up, a figure of authority interrupted, and too surprised to be displeased.

“I'm Margaret Darcy Newns,” Margaret said. “My husband is lost.”

The freeway gleamed where the headlights reflected on the swath of oil down each lane. It was loud, and it smelled of engine exhaust.

It wasn't going to be that easy. Cars barreled past him on either side, insensate, as oblivious as though driven by the blind.

Curtis danced toward the next pair of headlights to approach in his lane. The car grew huge, then, at the last, swept sideways, the driver fighting the wheel. The car, a big Detroit barge, screamed past, out of control.

None of these guys are going to hit me, thought Curtis. Absolutely none of them would do the predictable. How many had it been—five? Six? Each one saw him at the last moment, jammed on the brakes, fought into the next lane.

So Curtis stood still, in the middle of the fast lane, as a truck, a vague dreadnought in the dark, flicked its headlights from low to high beam and back again, bearing down ever closer, to the human body that was the only thing between its mass and the end of the world.

PART TWO

THE HOLE IN THE SKY

22

One step out of the apartment, into Via Cancello, and Bruno realized that he had forgotten the string bag.

He let himself back into the apartment. He tiptoed—Andy was still asleep upstairs. The string bag wasn't where it belonged, however, on its hook beside the stove. Bruno made his way as quietly as possible up the stairway. The steps were small, in the Continental fashion, and Bruno was not.

He could not find the bag of white netting anywhere, until at last he remembered one of Andy's silly little habits. The bag was stuffed into the mouth of a gargoyle on the dresser in the bedroom. Andy stirred in his sleep, made a half-word, and continued in his slumber. Beside the gargoyle was a pack of Marlboros, half-hidden under an empty camera case, and Bruno did not like this. Andy did not smoke.

I wish, thought Bruno to himself, that I had not seen that.

He was happy to be in the street again. There were things Bruno tended to forget about Rome, and rediscovered each time. The intensity of the traffic surprised him, even when he had been gone only a couple of weeks. That, and the onion-like scent of exhaust, and the
prrrp
tires made along the dark gray cubes of paving stones.

Maybe Andy had taken up smoking. He was still young enough to find the acquisition of a new vice something of an accomplishment.

Bruno had a flat near Holland Park in London, and a long-term understanding with the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, but spent as much time in Italy as he could. He had been born in Iowa, and raised in Colorado, his father designing bridges and flood-control waterways for the highway department, a careful, artistic man who liked the way a highway looked as it stretched ahead in the sun.

Bruno was not much interested in gradients and concrete. He was a man unlike anyone his father had ever known. He was like his long-dead father only in that he took an interest in the world of the real, and in the way he could not remain depressed about anything for very long.

A pack of cigarettes—hardly reason to stay unhappy on a glorious morning like this. The wash of details heartened him—the cheerfulness of the brush-shop owner as she opened for business, cranking the metal barrier upward until it settled into its recess with a metallic grumble, the bright sprinkle of sawdust over dog and cat soil in the street. Such sights allowed him to forget, for the moment, any doubts he had about Andy, about life.

The sun was warm. Fountains played, statues glistening with water, water splashing ceaselessly in the shade. Trash was set out in plastic bags, the handle loops knotted to forestall the cats, and street sweepers tossed the bundled garbage into the miniature—by Colorado standards—trash truck that followed. Romans were generally taller and more handsome than it was easy to remember, since one of the characteristics of this city was that the memory could only hold so much of it, there was so much that fled through the senses like water though the fingers. This was a place to see, not to recall.

Bruno smiled to himself as he remembered the one visit Curtis had spent here. Bruno had taken a room in the Hotel Raphael for Curtis, and introduced him to gallery owners, artists. Curtis had been polite, but late at night, after a fair amount of English gin, had confided that Europe was okay, but no improvement over the U.S. “I don't see the point,” he had said. “Nothing really happens here. We built a culture in a few decades. Here everything is talk, or war.”

Curtis was innocent of that sense of being excluded that made many people look beyond their native countries for intellectual nourishment. Curtis was, in a harmless sense, patriotic, preferring basketball to soccer, mashed potatoes to polenta. The visit had been years ago, but Curtis had probably changed little in that regard.

In the Campo di Fiori Bruno haggled briefly over tomatoes and zucchini, accepted a free bunch of basil from the woman who believed this rewarded her customers and brought them back to her. She was right, he reasoned as he thanked her, and then moved on to admire the fish staring upward from the ice. The ice was melting, already a stream of it across the cobblestones, and Bruno knew that soon all of this, the stalls, the shoppers, the white signs proclaiming the prices of pears, onions, potted flowers, would be gone, swept away to reappear again the following day.

Bruno walked briskly through the early morning blaze, bought a copy of
USA Today
at the Piazza Navona, and tucked the newspaper under his arm.

And he felt suddenly uneasy.

He strolled back toward the apartment, out of the piazza, past Passetto, the restaurant with the excellent carbonara, and when he was well within the shade of the street, he let himself think about what he
thought
he had seen on the front page.